2 <title>Installation of Bash</title>
4 <para>Before you attempt to install Bash, you have to check to make sure
5 your distribution has the <filename>/usr/lib/libcurses.a</filename> and
6 <filename>/usr/lib/libncurses.a</filename> files. If your host
7 distribution is an LFS system, all files will be present if you followed
8 the instructions of the book version you read exactly.</para>
10 <para>If both of the files are missing, you have to install the ncurses
11 development package. This package is often called something like
12 <emphasis>ncurses-dev</emphasis>. If this package is already installed,
13 or you just installed it, check for the two files again. Often the
14 <filename>libcurses.a</filename> file is (still) missing. If so, then
15 create <filename>libcurses.a</filename> as a symlink by running the
16 following commands as user root:</para>
18 <para><screen><userinput>cd /usr/lib &&
19 ln -s libncurses.a libcurses.a</userinput></screen></para>
21 <para>Now we can continue. Install Bash by running the following
24 <para><screen><userinput>./configure --enable-static-link --prefix=$LFS/usr \
25 --bindir=$LFS/bin --with-curses &&
27 make install &&
28 cd $LFS/bin &&
29 ln -sf bash sh</userinput></screen></para>
31 <para>If the make install phase ends with something along the lines of</para>
33 <blockquote><screen>install-info: unknown option `--dir-file=/mnt/lfs/usr/info/dir'
34 usage: install-info [--version] [--help] [--debug] [--maxwidth=nnn]
35 [--section regexp title] [--infodir=xxx] [--align=nnn]
36 [--calign=nnn] [--quiet] [--menuentry=xxx]
38 [--keep-old] [--description=xxx] [--test]
39 [--remove] [--] filename
40 make[1]: *** [install] Error 1
41 make[1]: Leaving directory `/mnt/lfs/usr/src/bash-&bash-version;/doc'
42 make: [install] Error 2 (ignored)</screen></blockquote>
44 <para>then that means that you are probably using Debian, and that you have an
45 old version of the texinfo package. This error is not severe by any means: the
46 info pages will be installed when we recompile bash dynamically in
47 chapter 6, so you can ignore it.</para>
49 <para>When we tested it with the latest Debian version, the last two
50 commands were executed because the install process didn't return with a
51 value larger than 0. But you would do good to check if you have the
52 <filename class="symlink">$LFS/bin/sh</filename> symlink on your LFS
53 partition. If not, run the last two commands manually now.</para>